2016
installation / objects/ video
Evil Earth System is an exhibition and a series of works based on the exploration of contemporary language and data visualization.
What began as test collaboration with Slovenian programmer Marko Plahuta became the foundation of a search into contemporary language, the possibilities of data visualisation, and its relationship to the representation of landscape. Exploring how the Internet and social media have changed how we use language, and to what purpose, over 8 million Tweets were collected over an extended period of time and mined for words starting with the prefixes anti-, pro-, pre-, post-, neo-, proto-, hyper- and contra-. The engaged, proactive, opinionated, agitated, and outspoken nature of the medium was investigated for its potential role in contemporary linguistic creativity – the collective generator of neologisms.
Our investigation yielded long lists of words and facts. The data was filtered, geo-located according to the country of registration of the Twitter account, and aggregated to create values that were applied to objects, shapes and gestures. The Evil Earth System data is available online, as a digital map of the world, a representation of landscape through language, an opinionated Evil Earth map. The map interactively visualizes the proportion of words with given prefixes and suffixes in each country of the world, normalised by country’s population.
The overall occurrences of prefixes were also converted to percentage values that could be directly translated into visual values, such as size of font, size of square, percentage of black gradient. This simple method of indexing was taken further and used in the construction of objects in the Evil Earth System exhibition. Not all the objects presented are visualized data, but all of them are inspired by the findings of our data mining.
In the tradition of concrete poetry of the 50’s and onward, the materiality of language (and in this case data) is utilized, both as meaning and as code. I looked towards early computer art, op art, conceptual art and the international movement that brought forth concrete/visual poetry for my historical reference points. I worked with a system of causes and effects, a tautological system of references extracting visual compositions out of data. I granted myself irrational interventions and subjective decisions as a ludic element in this exhibition-system, in contrasting the subjective with the methodological, the lyrical with the geometrical.
Objects, all reverse painting on plate glass, with some executed in the technique of “verre églomisé” (gilding with 22k gold leaf or genuine silver leaf), are arranged as a tabletop compositions, at the same time emancipated in their own materiality and elusive–dematerialised by light, transformed into invisible reflective surfaces. The shadows and reflections play as an important role as the objects themselves. It could be said that the research, the objects and this whole narrative is just a by-product, a necessary evil of the system, the method and the direction taken in the creating these light abstractions.
VIEW EVIL EARTH SYSTEM DATA ON WORLD MAP
List of Exhibits
Table 1
Prototype 7
installation, 16 objects, 22k gold leaf on glass, paint, wood, light, dimensions variable
Neoscope
object, 22k gold leaf on glass, paint, wood, 23 in x 23 in
Table 2
Anti Hero
object, 22k gold leaf on glass, paint, wood, 10.5 in x 18 in
hyper
object, 22k gold and genuine silver leaf on glass, paint, wood, 10.5 in x 18 in x 5 in
Order 6 – concrete poem
object, laser print on paper, glass, 11 x 8 in
pro
object, 22k gold and genuine silver leaf on glass, paint, wood, 12 in x 8 in x 3 in
Prototype 2
object, paint on glass, wood, 20 x 11.5 in x 10 in
Neosphere
object, paint on glass, 23 in x 23 in
Neoscape
object, paint on glass, 23 in x 23 in
Table 3
Frozen Data 1 & 2
2 objects, 4-color silkscreen on glass, 22 in x 30 in x 5 in each
Neologism
5 min, HD video
Lala Raščić 